Introduction
When I began, back in the late 1970s, to study “Islamwissenschaft” and learn Middle Eastern languages, the reading of short stories, poetry or excerpts from novels by Middle Eastern writers in their original languages and the discussion of the linguistic features, style, content and “messages” of these texts were considered a natural part of our study programs. It was a must—not only, however, because it served as an indicator of a student’s progress and lin- guistic proficiency, and not simply because dealing with “sublime, lofty” subjects was some- thing like a class marker, a sign of belonging to those who could enjoy higher education.
Rather, such reading was regarded as beneficial also with regard to the overall Humboldtian ideal of Bildung, the formation of young human beings in the spirit of a comprehensive hu- manism, which included the thorough knowledge of, and deep engagement with, the high- lights of “the Other’s” culture, out of an appreciation of each “culture nation’s” contribution to the universal cultural heritage of mankind. An elitist view? Edward Said was certainly right in accusing traditional “Oriental Studies” of tending, by and large, to essentialize “the”
Orient and to turn a blind eye on the present Middle East, or view it as a world of decay, while allowing for a Golden Age of “high culture” only in the Middle Ages, in order to pre- serve “the Orient” as a kind of Sleeping Beauty that had not woken up yet to modernity, that crucial stage in the Western conception of civilizational progress that had to be reserved for
“us,” the West. In many cases, however, his generalizing verdict did severe injustice to the individual researcher who did care about contemporary developments, did engage with the cultural production of his or her time, and was in contact and exchanged views, on equal terms, with his/her colleagues in the Middle East as well as with writers and artists them- selves. What is more, Said’s analysis of Western views of an ahistoric “eternal” Orient also overlooked the psychological importance the Classical Golden Age of Islamic culture had for the sense of self-worth of Middle Easterners in their meeting with hegemonious Western culture. While colonialism and economic domination had been highly successful in implant- ing in them a sense of inferiority and backwardness in almost every domain, the cultural achievements of the Middle Ages had always remained a source of pride, a positive aspect of Middle Eastern identity, not the least because at that time, cultural hierarchies were in- verted: Europeans were backward and hardly more than recipients, while the “East” was the giver, due to its advancement in knowledge and technologies.
Yet, it was not Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) alone that brought about changes in our approaches to the Middle East that resulted in a gradual depreciation or devaluation of read- ing and studying the modern literatures, and cultural production in general. The oil crisis of the early 1970s, militant Palestinian resistance, the civil war in Lebanon, the rise of funda- mentalist Islam and jihadist terrorism, the increasing presence of labour migrants, trauma- tized victims of the many wars as well as economic refugees who try to escape a chaotic,
dystopian situation after the collapse of the ancient regimes and the fragmentation of Middle Eastern societies—all this and much more was, and still is, responsible for that in public opinion, the study of cultural production, and with it fiction, does not make much sense any longer: reading “stories,” mostly thought to be nice and entertaining, like fairy-tales, seems to be too idealistic, too detached from the cruel, harsh realities of a politically, economically and socially explosive “hot spot” of the present world.
But the opposite is true—the need to look behind the scenes and study this cultural pro- duction is probably greater now than it ever used to be. Undeniable as the above-mentioned developments are, they have also produced, in collusion with neoliberal media and the eco- nomic logics of “infotainment” a discourse about the contemporary Middle East that is char- acterized by a focus on politics, religion (Islam) and violence, so that the region is hardly ever talked about but in a framework of despotism, permanent violation of human rights, political and economic refugee “waves” and the potential dangers an “explosion” of the “eter- nal powder kegs” “down there” might bring for “us.”
With this focus on the “explosive,” the “powder kegs,” the sensational, we are back to a reduction, often termed “neo-Orientalist,”1 of the Middle East which conceals a great danger although it looks perfectly realist and much less idealistic than “reading nice stories”: the danger of a lopsided, biased and negatively idealistic discourse which only focuses on the spectacular, contenting itself with a mainly superficial, descriptive coverage that only rarely makes an effort to look behind the scenes, into deeper structures, into the history and com- plexity and what is happening, and when it does so, tends to impose Western questions/per- spectives/theoretical frameworks on Middle East realities. Not seldom even Middle East Studies “surf-ride” on the waves stirred up by sensationalist media and take up the latter’s focus on politics, Islam and violence so that we hardly ever get out of the “bubble.” The difference to old-fashioned Orientalism only lies in the fact that Neo-Orientalism is not even partly balanced by Humboldtian ambitions any longer—they seem to be replaced by the im- peratives of an “us first” logic, so that now almost everything that Middle Easterners could be proud of is neglected in Western majoritarian public discouse: what is left is a Middle East that we either have to fear (because of its violence) or that is worth our pity (because of the misery and oppression of human rights there).
There is an urgent need, therefore, to counterbalance this discourse by broader approaches that give also the many other aspects of Middle Eastern realities—and with these the lives of Middle Easterners as fellow human beings—the attention they deserve. If we include in the overall picture the other cultures’ historical memory, their intellectual as well as everyday life, aesthetic concepts and emotional engagement with the worlds they live in we are likely
1 ʻNeo-Orientalism’ is termed a perspective that “recapitulate[s] key elements of Orientalism in a contem- porary setting” – Zachary LOCKMAN, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004, 219. – Cf. also Dag TUASTAD, “Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic Violence in the Middle East Conflict(s),” Third World Quar- terly, 24,4 (Aug. 2003): 591-99, <DOI: 10.1080/0143659032000105768>.
Introduction iii
to get a picture that is far more truthful to these realities than the sensationalist media cover- age and day-to-day reports about new suicide bombings or analyses of percentages of votes in some recent elections.
Reading literature is an excellent way to get such a broader, more comprehensive and, hence, also more realistic idea of the contemporary Middle East. For several reasons—the ensemble of which we could call “the added value of literature.”
In contrast to what current majoritarian discourse about the Middle East believes and wants to make us believe, there can be much more truth in fiction than in reports of facts or political-sociological studies, however well-informed they may be. Why is this so? It was already Aristotle who stated that there are basically two different ways to talk about reality and treat its phenomena or themes—a war or a social or moral problem, for example. The first approach he calls ekphérein, i.e., describing from outside, providing facts and data and explicit interpretation. The other is mimeîsthai, which actually means “to imitate,” but in our context first and foremost signifies “to stage” the phenomenon or problem itself. While the main mode of the former is the usual dissertation (a report about an event in history, for instance, a journalististic or scientific analysis), staging is essentially art’s, and especially theatre’s domain. Comparing the two approaches to reality, Aristotle discovers a strange re- lationship, or what at first sight seems to be a contradiction in itself: Although, for example, a theatrical play basically is fiction (poíēsis, imagination), and although it is the historical dissertation, not the piece of fiction which has the “hard facts,” a theatrical play about these facts may, according to the philosopher, nevertheless contain a higher degree of truth than the dissertation that has the hard facts. Aristotle’s paradoxon has fascinated many a wise thinker after him—most prominent among them perhaps German writer Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), literary critic Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), and art philosopher Theodor W.
Adorno (1903-1969). All of them confirmed the ancient Greek’s findings. Schiller, for ex- ample, who was very keen on history and in 1792 published a rather heavy Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (History of the Thirty Years’ War), must have been quite dissatis- fied with this treatise because, seven years later, he published another piece on the same historical topic; this time, however, it was fiction, a dramatic piece in three parts—Wallen- stein. He did so because he thought that this play expressed the Thirty Years’ War and what it really meant for mankind in a much better and more comprehensive way than the former, more or less one-dimensional dissertation. In this way he asserted again a perception that he had expressed already many years earlier in a slightly different context, namely the question, so central for a committed writer in the footsteps of Enlightenment and propagating the ideals of the French Revolution, which was the best way to enlighten people and elevate their mor- als? Already then had he concluded that theatre was much better suited than the usual schools to educate the people; theatre did what schools were supposed to do, in a much deeper and
more sustainable way. How could that be? What is the added value thanks to which fictional representations of reality go beyond factual discourses and surpass them?2
In short, it is composed of three main aspects:
a. their holistic approach, i.e., their search for wholeness, comprehensiveness;
b. their eagerness to penetrate the surface and advance to the basics, the essentials; and c. the emotional dimension; together with the latter we may also mention what H. U.
Gumbrecht calls the “concreteness” of literature.3
As for the first aspect, it can be said that, while the non-fictional discourse, and especially the common scientific dissertation, is characterized by focusing on a phenomenon or discuss- ing multiple aspects systematically, one after another, and describing them from the outside, ex-plicitly, in—ideally—the most objective way, literature, on the other hand, tries to place the facts in a larger context and to address more and other types of aspects to illustrate how one interrelates with the other or affects it (setting, background, agents, types of action, etc., all forming an intrinsically interwoven whole, a tissue, a text in the original meaning of the word, which is from Latin texare, “to weave, join, fit together, braid, interweave, etc.”). – Regarding the third, (c), it is almost natural that “sober” non-artistic discourses tend to ne- glect (because they have difficulties to adequately present) in their picture the dynamics of dramatic interaction and the emotional responses people show in certain situations, and the way these affect history. Literature, on the other hand, does exactly this. And it does so, moreover, in a way that allows us to “relive” these dynamics and emotional responses as if they were happening now. As Gumbrecht had it, literary texts are “particularly good at mak- ing the past present,” they “manage to make us feel surrounded by and immersed into the atmospheres” of the worlds they describe, give us a “sensual feeling of being part of and inscribed into” these worlds and their “rhythms’ transformation.”4 – As for (b), it is a fact that since a piece of fiction cannot have more than a very limited number of protagonists and actions/events taking place, the author is forced from the outset to make a choice and select.
At first glance, this looks like a limitation, a reduction of reality to a very small number of characters and situations. But the author’s operation is very similar to the one a mathemati- cian performs when s/he has many different individual triangles in front of him/her, but should say something about a triangle’s area in general. The mathematician then reduces an almost infinite number of possible variants to one example representing the idea that all the
2 For a concise and engaging introduction into this topic, cf., H. Porter ABBOTT, “Narrative and Truth,” = Chapter 11 in H.P.A., The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2008: 145-59, and Samia MEHREZ, “Introduction,” in S.M., Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction: Essays on Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim, and Gamal al-Ghitani, Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1994: 1-16 and 147-48 (notes).
3 Hans Ulrich GUMBRECHT, “Shall We Continue to Write Histories of Literature?,” New Literary History, 39 (2008): 519-532, here 530.
4 Ibid.
Introduction v
variants s/he can imagine have in common, i.e., to the basic, the essence. And by finding an abstract formula for the triangle’s area T in general—T = ½ bh, where b is the length of the base of the triangle, and h is its height or altitude, a simple formula with only two variables, or representatives of an infinite number of individual cases—the mathematician has found much more than just the area of any of them. Similarly, a figure or type of action and event, or a plot, in a piece of fiction may, although imagined, be much more than just a product of fantasy. Given that an author intends his/her characters and plots to be representative of re- ality, they account for much more than just one specific individual agent or event, they are meant to be typical, representing the essence.
This is especially true in the Middle East where the so-called “modern” (as opposed to
“Classical” and premodern) literature is a child of the reform process that started in the 18th/19th century and later came to be identified with the nation-building project. The emer- gence of this literature was intrinsically tied to the so-called effendi, the reform-minded sec- ular WOG (Westernized Oriental Gentleman) and intellectual who was eager to play an ac- tive role in shaping “the nation,” confront the public with realities that, in his/her opinion, required to be changed, make people see and teach them a “moral,” a “lesson.” While classi- cal literature, and especially poetry, was to a large extent self-referential, its aesthetic value depending on the author’s ability to produce “beautiful” language, for the new writer lan- guage was not an aim in itself, it was mainly a tool serving an end that lay outside literature:
the stories told should be useful, should help to reform society and advance the new young nations. This is why Richard Jacquemond, a French scholar who wrote a seminal analysis of the literary field in modern Egypt, described the role and self-view of the new men of letters as that of scribes et écrivains, “scribes and writers,” i.e., on the one hand, critical observers and analyzers who register what is going on around them while on the other hand, they also are authors of fiction; they are at the same time historians and creative writers, both function- ing as “conscience of the nation” (as the title of the English translation of Scribes et écrivains expresses it).5 The essentially referential character of modern Middle Eastern literatures, at least up to the 1980s, implies that the writers here, as in other modern literatures of the world, are very eager to establish a relation between the real world and the worlds of the stories they tell, every detail in these stories is chosen, consciously or intuitively, to refer to something in the real world; like the variables in a mathematic formula, they represent, in the author’s vision, concrete individual cases of lived reality. Stories therefore can count as parables with tight connection to the environments in which, and the circumstances under which, they were produced and/or appeared.
It is for this reason that we find everything that ever matters for the writers represented in their stories, a fact that makes literature into an immensely colourful kaleidoscope of all the
5 Richard JACQUEMOND, Entre scribes et écrivains: le champ littéraire dans l’Égypte contemporaine, Paris: Actes Sud, 2003 (translated into English by David TRESILIAN as Conscience of the Nation: Writers, State, and Society in Modern Egypt, Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2008).
topics and “hot issues” that authors ever were considered worthy to be taken up or felt an urgend need to thematize:
– From literature, we can learn, for example, about the evils authors of the Reform Period saw in their own societies, vices like gambling, drinking, greed, hedonism, passive fatal- ism, corruptibility, and/or the irresponsible squandering by spoilt Westernized youngsters of all the treasures they have inherited from their forefathers; we see the authors criticize the arrogance of the learned elites vis-à-vis the uneducated masses, “the people”; we are made to feel the impact widespread superstition and the lack of education have on con- temporary societies (poverty, lack of social mobility, the pain inflicted upon women through arranged marriages, etc.), so that we, immediately and intuitively, begin to feel the need for a reform of the educational system and for other measures to be taken by the ruler or the state.
– We get insight into the material situation and place in society of social groups like women, ethnic and/or religious minorities (Jews, Christians, Shia as opposed to Sunni Muslims), the blind, members of the working class, farmers, intellectuals, children, ...
– We begin to understand and sense the importance of social cohesion and the negative impact of fragmentation, in view of the big gaps in Middle Eastern societies—male/fe- male, rich/poor, educated/uneducated, city/countryside, etc.
– Of course, fiction does not produce “sturdy, stalwart, robust” analyses of the political and/or economic situation at a given time. Nevertheless, it lets us experience almost im- mediately and physically how it feels to live in a period of political instability, in a sur- veillance state, under a dictator—there is, for instance, a whole branch of Middle Eastern literature composed of texts written in prison or describing the atmosphere there. Difficult economic circumstances or veritable crises certainly do not remain less tangible: many authors come from a very poor background, describe the predicament of poverty, and many have traveled, for political and/or economic reasons, to countries in the West, where they thematize their own and their fellow-countrymen’s migration, the painful loss of a dear homeland, the difficulties of uprooting and challenges of having to adapt to a new world—a world that often is that of the former colonizer, so that migrant literature con- tinues a topic that is as old as modern Middle Eastern literature itself, namely that of – East versus West, a major theme that emerged as a result of the authors’ engagement with
the question of cultural identity and the problem of remaining “oneself” in spite of the need to somehow give in to the normative pressure of a hegemonial “Western” culture or, as the case may be, the wish to “modernize” one’s own society along the “modern”
Western model. We learn about acts of injustice committed by the colonizer and about the colonized’s reactions to them. But we are also made to feel the deep personality/iden- tity split produced by the fact that many Easterners, despite all suffered injustice, still are full of admiration for the many achievements of the West, both material and intellectual:
Introduction vii
it seems to be a tragic impasse to see one’s own countrymen exploited, slaughtered, dis- dained, degraded while simultaneously being in favour of “progress”, “freedom”, “equal- ity”, and many other “Western” values. As in real life, in fiction too this dichotomy often becomes gendered and takes the form of a difficult relationship between an “Oriental”
man and a “Western” woman, or it is paralleled by a discussion of “modern, progressive”
concepts, like love, versus “traditional” practices like arranged marriages. As a reader, we become witness to all the corresponding suffering, the pains caused by conflicting concepts, and the search for solutions that could help treat the wounds and provide alter- native ways to regain home and identity.
– The emotional responses to all these developments and dichotomies are given literary expression by the authors in various forms: the actions of the heroes, the dramatic tension put into the plot, the emotional content of the chosen style, etc. And it goes almost without saying that we also get to know various types of comments by the authors’ themselves to the processes they observe in their societies: they range from sober, seemingly detached,
“neutral” description to desperate outcry, from melancholy to an inexorable merciless exposition of the details of what is perceived as wrong, from a nostalgical looking back to committed accusation, often in form of bitter irony or biting sarcasm, from philosoph- ical contemplation to the mocking denunciation of the absurdities of existence, from vest- ing one’s opinion in symbolic garments to the imagination of utopias: how a better world could/should look like. The narratives are often daring, their authors risking imprison- ment for speaking out against despotic rulers or for violating taboos. When sexual taboos are transgressed authors often are accused to being “too explicit, licentious,” while the violation of religious taboos brings them accusation of “blasphemy,” and if they portray a murderous father this may be found “disgusting”—not because of the homicide but as a symbolic act of anti-patriarchal criticism). Whatever topic authors choose and however they “stage” them, they are always informed by minute observation and a “seismo- graphic” registration of what society goes through, according those who perceive of them- selves as the “conscience of the nation.”
As a matter of course, the present anthology tries to cover at least some of this thematical breadth and the many attitudes expressed by the authors in face of the “hot issues” they made into topics of their narratives. The decision to focus on “canonical” texts guarantees such a representative coverage almost automatically, since this means a focus on works that both contemporaries and later generations considered and consider of particular relevance, either because of their content or their form or the reactions they provoked, etc. (for whatever rea- son: as exemplary representation of a conflict, as a scandalon, as symbol of national pride or token of identity formation, as an iconical best-seller, etc.). These texts received broad atten- tion when they appeared, and continue to resonate in the memory of a given culture: they are remembered, republished, quoted, read in schools, recommended for translation, studied and
re-studied at universities, turned into films, or followed up in satirical form, as parodies, per- siflages, etc.6
The close correspondence between fiction and lifeworlds, the “added value” of fiction (comprehensiveness, essentiality, emotional dimension), and the richness of literary produc- tion—all this should be reason enough to argue that the study of such fiction should be in- cluded in every analysis of the Middle East and should definitely be given adequate space in any study program of the Area Studies type. But if the literature is so rich in itself, and given the “concreteness,” as Gumbrecht called it, of literary representations of the factual world, isn’t it sufficient to just read them? Is there a need for explanation, discussion and the aca- demic study of these texts at all? – Yes, there is. The reason is that the real treasures contained in literature are hidden between the lines. They are immediately accessible, “present” in their
“concreteness,” but like a mathematical formula that already contains all necessary infor- mation in a nutshell, in the beauty of its conciseness, the variables need to be explained in order to “give meaning.” To quote art philosopher Th. W. Adorno’s wellknown observation, which, interestingly enough, like Aristotle’s finding quoted above, also takes the form of a quasi-paradoxon:
[...] art requires philosophy [i.e., an aesthetic theory], which interprets it in order to say what it is unable to say, whereas art is only able to say it by not saying it.7 Thus, as a specific form of art, literature needs a science that interprets it, because as art, it does not say things explicitly, it treats them implicitly, particularly through its form and struc- ture. Much of what we called “the added value” of literature—the “completeness” of a short story, for example, the representativeness of its characters, background, plot, etc., the varia- ble-like “essentiality” of every detail, including the story’s emotional dynamics—all this is not addressed explicitly, it is not “said,” as Adorno has it. Would it be made explicit the story wouldn’t be a piece of art any longer but a treatise, and it would have lost its added value.
Given that the degree of artistic compression and literary density, and hence also the need for explication and interpretation, are highest in poetry, the present anthology deliberately refrained from including samples from this genre—the explanatory apparatus an edition would have needed would have been too extensive, almost every single word, its sound, and the many layers of its potential meaning would have required a footnote; not to speak of
6 For a characterization of the literary canon that formed my own understanding of the term, cf. Heinz Ludwig ARNOLD, “Vorwort zur dritten, völlig neu bearbeiteten Auflage” (preface to the third, completely revised edition), Kindlers Literatur Lexikon, Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2009 (online edition, <http://kll-orig- inal.cedion.de/>, last consulted August 6, 2018).
7 “Deshalb bedarf Kunst der Philosophie, die sie interpretiert, um zu sagen, was sie nicht sagen kann, wäh- rend es doch nur von Kunst gesagt werden kann, indem sie es nicht sagt” – Th. W. ADORNO, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7: Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997 [1970]: 113. – The English translation as in Th. W. A., Aethetic Theory, red. Gretel ADORNO & Robert HULLOT-KENTOR, A&C Black (Contin- uum impacts; Impacts Series), 2004: 94.
Introduction ix
similes, metaphors, metre, rhythm, rhymes, colour symbolism, and so on. In contrast, the language of prose fiction is—as the word itself already suggests—much more “prosaic,”
closer to everyday language, and its narrative logic follows, in principle, the same laws as those underlying factual narratives. Sometimes, if we don’t know in advance that we are dealing with a piece of fiction we may think that it is the report about something that has happened in reality. Or, vice versa, the report about a real event may at first sound as if it was fiction. Given this analogy, the present anthology could do with two major tools that may help the Western reader to reach an understanding of the Middle Eastern texts contained in it in a way that comes close to the meaning they had for Middle Easterners themselves at the times they appeared.
One of these tools is the usual Glossary. The Glossary explains all names and terms (re- ligion, food, clothing, etc.) that appear in the texts and I assumed to be unknown to the aver- age Western reader. The names and terms that are explained in the Glossary are set in Arial in the stories, so as to mark them without harming the text’s integrity and disturbing its “pure”
presence.
The second explanatory tool is twofold. Each selected short story or excerpt from a novel is preceded by a Headline and an Introduction, both referring to the text’s content and the
“meaning” it had at the time it appeared. Of course, the “meaning” of a text, if taken out of its context, is a relative thing, it changes across time and from recipient to recipient, and as pieces of art all the texts have their own lives, independent of their authors; as good literature, they are “timeless” in that they “talk” also to us who are living in another age and culture, yet feel that they have something to say also “for us.” However, while this “eternal” or “uni- versal” value is important and should not be neglected, the main aim of our reading is histor- ical: rather than asking what the texts may mean now and for us, we ask what their respective authors probably had in mind with them and how they were read by Middle Easterners at the time they appeared. While the year of a text’s first publication is indicated both in the Table of Contents and at the beginning of each new chapter, the Headline preceding each title tries to give a concise characterization in terms of content and significance. For example, the head- line Reformism Defeated: The Seductive Pleasures of the Old System, preceding the translation of Refik Halit Karay’s “The Peach Orchards” (1919?), indicates that the following story will be about the pleasures with which an old system tempts the protagonist, and it also gives a first hint with regard to the meaning of a story about such a “seduction plot” in the context of contemporary nationalist-reformist discourses: it has to be read as a novella that tells a story of defeated reformism, the seductive power of old structures in a period of change, the inertia of a sluggish old-established bureaucracy in a provincial town that can afford not to bother about the enthusiastic nationalist activism that has already taken over in the capital. – The introductory texts that then follow, each preceding the corresponding story text itself, highlight the texts’ main features and explain these against the backdrop of the period in which they were written, published and read, elaborating on the “nuclear,” condensed infor- mation given in the headline. The introductions point to noteworthy stylistic aspects and
highlight, in an essayistic form not aspiring to comprehensiveness, the authors’ choice of topics, characters, events and settings as well as the main structural features that characterize the way they “dramatize” their plots. With this, the introductions provide background knowledge, contextualize, i.e., build bridges between texts and the con-texts of their time, between fictional representation and the real worlds in which they are embedded and with which they interact by commenting on it and moulding it into narratives the authors regard as representing the real world. Each introductory text also refers back to earlier texts and often also announces further developments, as observable in texts that will follow. Thus, there is a “red thread” leading from one text to the next, linking the stories with each other, drawing attention to continuity or ruptures, contrasts and developments. The ensemble of all introductory essays thus combines to a literary history of Middle Eastern prose fiction in a nutshell.
The present anthology is intended, in the first place, as a travel through the history of the contemporary Middle East, a collection of historical documents for everybody with a keen interest in looking behind the scenes and acquiring intimate first-hand knowledge about this region and how it came to be what it is today. As a consequence of the essentially historical approach, the stories are arranged chronologically, not by topic. (References back and forth from one story to others with related content, topic, or stylistic features, etc., are, however, made in the introductions.) To the same extent as I have tried, in my selection of texts, to cover a large variety of virulent topics and literary approaches, I have also made an attempt to achieve a more or less even distribution of texts over the—roughly—one and a half cen- turies that have elapsed since the appearance of the first “modern”-type texts.8 It goes almost without saying that there are “dense” periods in history, with heightened intellectual activity, and others that pass more calmly, often after some consolidation where authors decide to first wait and see how things develop, or after a shock where they are still unable to speak. This uneven “texture” of history is also mirrored, however tentatively, in my selection of texts.
The reader will notice, for instance, that the year 1954 is represented by no less than three stories and 1963 even by four. This is due to the fact that, in my view, the period I labelled
“Beginning Doubts” is one of the most virulent and decisive periods in Middle Eastern 20th century history. Why? The reader will find some explanations in the introductory paragraphs, since these not only discuss the stories’ place in their respective periods but also the features of the eight periods themselves into which I divided the one and a half centuries covered by this anthology. It is right, of course, that there is since long broad agreement within literary studies about the nature of periods: they aren’t “real” entities, aren’t just “there” as undenia- ble “objective” realities and indisputable “facts”; rather, they are ideas, concepts we produce
8 The question which work should be considered the first piece of modern Arabic, Turkish, Persian or Hebrew literature is still being debated. The view of individual researchers notwithstanding, there seems to be a consense that it came into being some time during the 1850/1860s and has to be seen in connection with the spread of private printing enterprises. – Cf. also footnote 1 to the introduction to the very first story in this anthology, p. ...
Introduction xi ourselves and use to talk about history. Actually, we also need them in order to be able to talk about history at all—without periods, there would be no history in the modern sense, there would only be a meaningless, uniform flow of time, mechanically adding event after event, year after year, in the form of premodern annals. On the one hand, it is exactly for this reason—the need to conceptualize, talk about history, and give it a meaning—that I am using the eight periods framework. On the other hand, as historians of concepts know, concepts, and among these also historical concepts like periods, do not completely lack “reality.” It is true that they aren’t contained in the “things themselves,” they are ideas applied to them;
however, as concepts, i.e., as ways of giving the past and present, sometimes even the future, a meaning, they are present in the minds of those who live in time and try to make sense of it. Whoever says “We are living in times of…” or “This was a time when we used to…” is making a generalizing statement, s/he does not only talk about the moment s/he is speaking in but about a span of time of which individual moments and experiences form part and which they then look at “from above,” identifying certain features that these moments and experi- ences share with other moments and experiences of the same time span so that they are con- ceived of as testifying to the same Zeitgeist, the “spirit of the age.” And these ideas are real- ities in their own right—often very powerful even, capable of igniting fierce debates. Of course, the view on history may change in the course of time, so that previously accepted period names no longer seem to be meaningful and/or lose relevance and/or importance while others begin to make more and better sense, and what at a certain point in time was considered a radical shift, or a rupture, may look less revolutionary from a later perspective. Therefore, the user of the present anthology will always have to keep in mind that the periodizational framework used to group and talk about our texts here is, to a certain degree, only a snapshot, based on a certain way of looking at the past one and a half centuries of Middle Eastern literary history now.
For an elaboration of the eight phases model for Arabic prose, cf. my entry “Novel, Arabic” in The Encyclopædia of Islam Three [EI³], ed. K. Fleet [et al.], Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014: 144-152;
online version: <http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/novel-arabic- COM_ 27115>. The entry also contains an extensive bibliography on modern Arabic literature, espe- cially the novel. – A more concise overview for Arabic, with a similar periodization, is Walid HAMARNEH’s entry “fiction, modern” in the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature [EAL], edited by Paul STARKEY and Julie Scott MEISAMI, London and New York: Routledge, 1998, i: 230-233. Useful, but not leading farther than 1950, is Roger ALLEN’s “Introduction” to volume III (1850-1950) of Essays in Arabic Literary Biography, edited by himself, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010: 1-23. Readers of Scandinavian languages may also profit from the excellent overview over “Some important topics in Arabic literature” (original Swedish: “Några viktiga teman i arabisk litteratur”) by Marina STAGH in her Modern Arabisk prosa, Lund: Bibliotektjänst, 1996: 40-82, or Ellen WULFF’s introductory essay (in Danish), “Indledning: Moderne arabisk litteratur,” in Ørkenrosen, og andre noveller fra Mel- lemøsten, edited by Claus PEDERSEN, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2003: 11-25.
As for Persian, there is an excellent overview in Danish by Claus PEDERSEN in the collection just mentioned: “Indledning: Moderne persisk litteratur,” op. cit.: 175-87. For Anglophone readers, Houra YAVARI’s two concise articles, both published 2002, on “The Persian Novel” and “The Persian
Short Story” can serve as a first point of orientation (available online from the website of the Iran Chamber Society, <http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/articles/persian_ novel.php> and <.../per- sian_short_story.php>. – Periodization terminology differs considerably here, but this is mainly due to national ideosyncrasies: Iranian literary history is hardly ever compared to that of any other Middle Eastern country.
For Turkish, I can recommend Azade SEYHAN’s “Introduction: Novel Moves,” which is Chapter 1 (pp. 1-22) of the scholar’s very readable Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context, New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008. For a broader and more detailed presentation, cf. Erdağ GÖKNAR’s “The novel in Turkish: narrative tradi- tion to Nobel prize,” = Chapter 17 in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 4: Turkey in the Modern World, edited by Reşat KASABA, Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press, 2008: 472-503. An excellent overview, though available only in Danish, is also Wolfgang E. SCHARLIPP, “Indledning:
Moderne tyrkisk litteratur,” again in Ørkenrosen (op.cit.), 2003: 241-50.
The latter collection also contains a very good survey (in Danish as well) of modern Hebrew fiction by Judith WINTHER: “Indledning: Moderne hebraisk litteratur,” ibid., 101-12. This presenta- tion is as concise as, but more recent than, Robert Alter’s “Introduction” in the anthology, edited by himself, from which also some of the texts of the present anthology are taken: Modern Hebrew Lit- erature, West Orange: Behrman House Inc., 1975: 1-12. Glenda Abramson’s study “Israeli Literature as an Emerging National Literature” focusses on the period of Israeli nation-building, but with a number of illuminating excurses into earlier and later periods; it is to be found in the volume Israel:
The First Decade of Independence, edited by Ilan TROEN and Noah LUCAS, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995: 331-53.
Readers of German may still find the overview articles over all four national literatures contained in the second edition of the voluminous Kindlers Neues Literatur Lexikon helpful although this is from 1988-92 and therefore no longer up to date.9
Closely related to the question of periodization is, of course, also the assumption, constitui- tive for the whole anthology and the free mixing of texts from four distinct “national litera- tures”—Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew—that they actually are mixable because the four
“national literatures,” despite all national specificities, basically and essentially followed very similar, parallel lines of historical development. It lies beyond the scope of this intro- duction to elaborate on this topic. Suffice it to mention that each of the four literatures can look back, and draw, on a great heritage—classical Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Ottoman liter- ature with aesthetics that had much in common—and each of them started a new life in the Middle East in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when the “modern” Western model was increasingly felt to be the norm that one’s own culture had to follow in order not to remain “backward” and instead belong to the new global community, the community of nation states. All these literatures went through an initial phase in which a new secular, re- form-minded elite—to which most of our modern authors belonged—emerged and actually
9 Wiebke WALTHER, “Die arabische Literatur,” vol. 19: 881-96 (modern prose fiction: 892-95); Anat FEIN- BERG, “Die moderne hebräische Literatur,” vol. 19: 905-13; Amir Abbas HAIDARI, continued by Touradj RAHNEMA, “Die neupersische Literatur,” vol. 20: 528-40; Elisabeth SIEDEL, “Die moderne türkische Lit- eratur,” vol. 20: 634-39 – all in Kindlers Neues Literatur Lexikon, edited by Walter JENS, München: Kin- dler, 1988-92.
Introduction xiii took over as political class after the breakdown of the Old Empires following WWI (epito- mized in great national-reformist leader figures like Saʿd Zaghlūl in Egypt, Mustafa Kemal
“Atatürk” in Turkey, or Reżā Shāh Pahlavi in Iran). The phase of nation-building that fol- lowed was characterized by a search for new foundations and the endeavour to acquire, de- velop, test and master new adequate techniques of writing. Early nationalist enthusiasm and optimism was often soon superseded by its opposite, deep disappointment, frustration, even pessimism and despair, a mood that was not easy to defeat, not only in face of the challenges of nation-building itself but also due to the difficult political and economic circumstances of the interwar period and WWII itself, of which the Middle East was one arena. The postwar period is characterized again by the search for new foundations: the past two decades have been very hard and sobering; but what kind of conclusion should one draw, how go on? New ideologies seemed to offer tempting ways to possibly regain earlier enthusiasm and a brighter outlook on life; at the same time, however, the path that the new nations had begun to tread, the path of “modernization,” became increasingly doubtful, not the least because it also meant to give up old certainties and lose stable ground. In a way, the whole twentieth century can be divided in periods of similar ups and downs, phases of new hope and idealism followed by disillusionment in face of the drawbacks, then reassembling again, and so on. Of course, there are also considerable differences between the national literatures: the defeat suffered in the Six-Day War of June 1967 came as a devastating shock in the Arab World that also had a severe impact on the literary scene; in contrast, it was a victory for Israel that, for some at least, brought self-assurance; meanwhile, the event passed almost without being noticed in Turkey or Iran; neither the Arab countries’ nor Turkey’s or Israel’s history knows something that would be comparable to the Islamic Revolution 1979 in Iran; the pre-nationstate history of the Jewish people, including the Holocaust, so deeply imprinted in Jewish memory and part and parcel of the ideology of the newly erected State of Israel, has no comparable coun- terpart in Arab, Turkish or Iranian history—many more cases of difference and national pe- culiarity could come to mind. Yet, it seems that, by and large, it is still possible, and mean- ingful, to tell the history of all the traits that the four national literary histories nevertheless do have in common, along one overarching narrative. I have argued in great detail for such an “integrated” history in the case of the modern Arabic and Turkish novel.10 Before me,
10 Stephan GUTH, Brückenschläge: Eine integrierte ‘turkoarabische’ Romangeschichte (Mitte 19. bis Mitte 20. Jhdt.) (Building Bridges: an integrated history of the ‘Turco-Arabo’ novel, mid-19th to mid-20th c.), Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003 (Literaturen im Kontext / Literatures in Context; vol. 14). An essay that pre- sented a first tentative outline of the idea later developed systematically in Brückenschläge, was “Zwei Regionen – eine Literaturgeschichte? Zwei zeitgenössische Romane aus Ägypten und der Türkei und die Möglichkeit einer übergreifenden Periodisierung nahöstlicher Literaturen,” Die Welt des Islams, 34 (1994): 218-245, <DOI: 10.2307/1570931>. For a concise examplification of the model, including a dis- cussion of its relevance in the context of the concept of “world literature,” cf. (in German) “Die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen: Die globalen Dimensionen nahöstlicher Literatur,” Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques, 56/4 (2002): 833-856, <https://www.e-periodica.ch/cntmng?pid=ast- 002:2002:56::1065>, or (in English) “The Simultaneity of the Non-Simultaneous: The Global Dimensions of Middle Eastern Literature (esp. in the 19th Century),” in Crossings and Passages in Genre and Culture,
Robin OSTLE had already gathered a group of scholars and edited a volume in the same spirit.11 And only recently Reza ASLAN published an anthology of Middle Eastern literature that even includes modern Urdu (though not considering Hebrew).12 Both Ostle and Aslan show grids of periodization that are less detailed than my own. But the three of us agree in that WWI and the end of WWII marked some form of caesura, thresholds, or turning points.
It is beyond the purpose of this introduction to further discuss these models. What is im- portant is to see that communalities between Middle Eastern literatures obviously are broad enough to allow for overarching frameworks. To give the reader an idea about how different these may look nevertheless, let me just juxtapose the three models here, without further commenting on the details and differences:
OSTLE (ed.) 1991 ASLAN (ed.) 2011 This anthology
I 1850-1914 The Age of Transla- tion and Adaptation
I 1910-1950
I The Beginnings of Modern Lit- erature in the Middle East: The Reform Period, 1850ff.
II Fin-de-siècle / Pre-World War I, 1890s-1910s
II 1914-1950 From Romantic Na- tionalism to Social Criticism
– The Language of Invention:
The Renaissance of Arabic Lit- erature, 1910-1920
– My Country: The Nationaliza- tion of Turkish Literature, 1920-1930
– Once Upon a Time: Politics and Piety in Persian Literature, 1930-1940
– Rise Up! Pakistan and the Inde- pendence of Urdu Literature, 1940-1950
III Early Nation-Building and the Interwar Period, 1910s-1920s
IV Post-World War II, late 1930s- early 1950s
III 1950-[c1980]
The Age of Ideology and Polarization since 1950
II 1950-1980
– I am Arab: Arabic Literature at Midcentury
– Strangers in a Strange Land:
Turkish Literature after Atatürk – Those Days: Persian Literature
Between Two Revolutions – Between the Dusk and Dawn of
History: Urdu Literature after Partition
V Beginning Doubts, 1950s-1960s
VI New Sensibility, 1960s-1970s
III 1980-2010
Ask Me About the Future: The Globalization of Middle East Literature
VII Postmodernism, 1980s-1990s VIII New Humanism, 2000s-2010s
edited by Christian Szyska and Friedrike Pannewick, Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2003: 121-137.
11 Modern Literature in the Near and Middle East, 1850-1970, London & New York: Routledge, 1991.
12 Reza ASLAN (ed.), Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011 (a Words without Borders Anthology).
Introduction xv
Whoever makes an attempt to look from a distance and tries to see simultaneous literary phenomena not only as chronologically close but also as genuinely “coeval,” i.e., speaking of a shared Zeitgeist, will soon discover that political givens (as, for instance, the fact that a country was colonized while another remained independent) in the long run may not be so important for the development of such a general mood or atmosphere. Thus, a country like Turkey may have gained full political autonomy (already in 1923) but still struggle to cope with the factual cultural dominance of Europe and therefore show similar discussions of the alleged East-West dichotomy as does Arab literature where many countries had remained under foreign occupation for a much longer time. On the other hand, our model should not be abused to unduely making everything into one: Despite many parallels with other modern literatures from the Middle East, Hebrew literature often stands out as definitely different and more similar to Western than to Middle Eastern literatures. And the reasons for this are not only cultural but clearly also political: As much as it can draw on Classical Hebrew literature, its roots are also in Europe, and as much as it is the continuation of the literature of a minority that was persecuted in the West, it is also the literature of a Western-type colonizer.
* * * * *
Before concluding this introduction, a few words remain to be said about the selection of the texts that “made it” into this anthology and the anthology’s use in classroom.
As for the selection, it was not only guided by the idea of canonicity and representative- ness, mentioned above. As a matter of course, also availability of the respective texts in Eng- lish translation was an important criterion. Turkish is a bit of a problem child in this respect.
In contrast especially to Germany whose relations with Turkey can look back on a long past and where Turkish migrants and their children meanwhile form a rather large part of the overall population, the bonds between Turkey and the English-speaking world are compara- tively weak, so that the spectrum of major works of Turkish literature available in English translation is much narrower than in German. This is why a rather large number of translated Turkish texts had to be taken from only one source, Kemal SİLAY’s seminal Anthology of Turkish Literature of 1996.
Another objective of the selection was to reach, ideally at least, a fair balance of all four major languages. For me, this meant that the number of included texts should somehow cor- respond to the “weight” the language and literature has in international politics and culture.
Given that there are many more speakers of Arabic than of the other languages, preference had to be given to Arabic. In terms of literary production, Arabic may even be topped by Turkish, so that this literature had to come at least second, with Persian and Hebrew roughly equalling each other on place three.
As a matter of course, it also seemed desirable that each of the periods receive equal coverage, in order not to impose our own view of history. On the other hand, a tighter cover- age of periods of increased cultural productivity seemed to be unavoidable, and also mean- ingful. Thus, the reader-user will notice that while there is a certain uninterrupted “flow”
from decade to decade, the periods of early national literature as well as that of socially crit- ical realism are represented more strongly, corresponding to the “boom” these movements saw in their times. It also happened that not less than four texts from one single year—1963—
suggested themselves to be included in our selection. Thinking that this was in itself signifi- cant I made no endeavour to reduce the number to three or two. Thus, 1963 now stands out as a year in which particularly many texts expressing “Beginning Doubts” appeared.
Although this anthology is published seven years after the so-called “Arab Spring” of 2010/2011, the selection ends before that. This is partly due to the scarce availability of rel- evant texts in English translation, partly to the fact that it would have been difficult to select
“canonical” or “representative” texts—everything is still in the process of re-formation and will need many years to consolidate.
Finally, a big “thank you” is in place: This anthology, and the choice of texts, would probably have looked quite different had I not received lots of “likes” or “don’t likes” from the many students with whom I have read and discussed many of the texts for more than twenty years in Berlin, Bern, Munich, Oslo… as well as the fruitful discussions I had about Middle Eastern literatures with colleagues from Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Hebrew Liter- ature Studies—a big “thank you” also to them!
The readership of this anthology will, hopefully, be broader than the small group of stu- dents with whom I use to discuss the texts in courses on the history of the modern and con- temporary Middle East and its literatures. In principle, the collection is intended to serve—
as I said above—“everybody with a keen interest in looking behind the scenes and acquiring intimate first-hand knowledge about this region and how it came to be what it is today.”
However, given the fact that the book will also be used in class, be it at highschools or uni- versities and other academic institutions where future “Middle East experts” are trained, it may be useful to suggest to both student and teacher a catalogue of questions that can be asked to prepare a historical reading, i.e., to first obtain a detailed description of potentially meaningful features, then to try to go beyond description and make an attempt at contextual- ization, the interpretation of the text’s features against the backdrop of its time. (For a theo- retical discussion of the usefulness of reading literature in courses on the Middle East, as well as a number of “workshop reports” discussing related practical pedagogical questions, cf. the two recent publications by Muhsin J. al-MUSAWI13 and Michelle HARTMAN.14)
Analysis (descriptive part)
– What is/are the main theme(s), the topic(s) of the text? What is it about?
– Characters & their actions: Who is / what kind of (main) characters are involved?
Which features/atributes does the author assign to them / stresses in them (e.g., social
13 Muhsin J. al-MUSAWI (ed.), Arabic Literature for the Classroom: Teaching Methods, Theories, Themes and Texts, Abingdon, Oxon & New York, NY: Routledge, 2017.
14 Michelle HARTMAN, Teaching Modern Arabic Literature in Translation, Modern Language Association of America, 2018 (Options for Teaching series).
Introduction xvii standing, outward appearance, character)? Can the characters be divided into certain groups (e.g., “good” vs. “evil”), do some of them side with another character, or oppose him/her? Which are the essential traits of their actions? Are they (probably) meant to represent a certain class, a social group, a human virtue/vice, an idea?
– From which perspective are the events told? Is the narrator prominent at all, does one feel his/her presence? If so, how (with which narrative devices) does the author achieve this effect? Is the narrator involved / taking part in the events, and if so, how, and to what extent? How is s/he related to the other characters and their actions, whom does s/he side or sympathize with? And: Does narrative perspective change (e.g., outside→in- side perspective, inner thoughts, etc.)?
– Narrated space: Where do the events take place (which setting/s does the author choose, e.g. countryside, a train, a slum in a megalopolis, a prison, a bedroom, …)? How are the spaces characterized, are they loaden with a specific atmosphere? Are certain spaces
‘connected’ with certain characters? Is space important? How is space organized/struc- tured? Is there only one space (e.g., a police station), or are there more than one (e.g., scenes in a luxurious villa alternating with others in a village hut; or the events taking place in a real space while the protagonist rememberes, every now and then, a space from his/her childhood, or imagines a changed environment in the future)? What about movements in space (e.g., travelling, horse-riding, space-switching)?
– Narrated time: When do the events take place? How is narrated time structured in the text? Can the story be segmented into narrative sequences and, if so, how are these
‘building-bricks’ arranged (chronologically, in an associative manner, …)? Where is the natural chronology inverted, where is time condensed or extended?
– Stylistic features: e.g., dialect?, high/low linguistic level (slang, popular expressions)?, imagery: metaphors, symbols; long complex / simple short sentences; other stylistic de- vices: parallelism, hyperboles, contrast tropes; irony?; …
Interpretation (contextualization)
– Synthesis: What, presumably, is the text’s central “message”? What would be the most appropriate term to describe the author’s attitude and proceeding, how does s/he see him/herself: what kind of role in society is the author assuming for him/herself by pub- lishing such a text (is s/he speaking here, e.g., as a teacher, or a critic, a moralist, a silent observer, …)?
– Which function do the elements and structures discovered and described in the preceding step (analytic description) fulfil with regard to the overall “message” of the text? Why, probably, did the author take up this topic at that time? Why did s/he choose the charac- ters s/he actually has chosen to become the hero(in/es) of his/her story? Why with this type of actions/events, not others? Which function do space, time, style fulfil with regard to the overall “message”? → contextualize!
Stephan Guth – Oslo, August 2018
